Jim Bunny Rogers Rabbits www.sunlive.co.nz

It's a ‘What would YOU do?' competition this week – a test of your courage, your instincts, your initiative and your community.

And there are three great prize options – a burial at sea with a person of your choice, afternoon tea with the city commissioners, or double tickets to the work wife's social netball team practice.

But please contain your excitement until you have considered the following scenario.

You are driving through town one morning. You are on your way for a coffee fix. You happen upon a bunch of crud, scumbag, rat-breathed ram raiders helping themselves to what's not theirs from a smashed up shop which is quite likely some family's livelihood.

Do you:

1. Rationally or irrationally over-ride your instincts, burst in on the raiders, bang heads until they bleed and make a citizen's arrest?

2. Follow your natural namby-pamby instincts, pull your onesie hood over your head and flee the scene?

3. Take a pastoral approach, appeal to better sense. After they have filled their loot bags, explain to the perps that ram raids are now passé and they should not compromise their liberty for vapes and lollies – which, like incarceration, are both bad for you?

4. Buy a pie and do the Stuff Quiz while you wait for the cop shop to open in three hours so you can report the crime?

5. Ring your lawyer and find out how long you might go down for on a murder or manslaughter charge if you administered summary justice to the ram raiders with a weapon of your choice?

6. Or, wait for it….dum-de-dah! Call a hard-assed ‘Super Gran', fighter of crime and/or evil, who has no fear of personal injury or death, and can put a wrong very right?

The police don't like us taking the law into our own hands, they don't like vigilantism, and they don't like right-minded people putting themselves unnecessarily at risk, so they would probably advocate for numbers 2 or 4 or both.

But I reckon 6, and I am surprised the international media hasn't been beating at her door because she's a great story. We don't know her name and I suspect she was wearing a black mask and a long red cape. But being an autumnal 5.30am when this all unfolded, winceyettes were probably the reality.

Anyhow ‘Super Gran' was doing an early morning coffee run when she came across the ram raiders getting about their wicked work.

‘Super Gran' immediately knew this 'wasn't right” and decided 'this wasn't happening”. And she charges her Toyota RAV4 over a traffic island straight into the getaway car outside the shop. Crunch!

All the time she is honking her horn. And when she can't find reverse, she barrels forward into the getaway car again. Crunch again! Go Super Gran!

The raiders skedaddle, but she can identify, well, a bit of one of them. He was a fat chap who took a tumble in the excitement and bared a ‘builder's crack'.

That should narrow the field of likely suspects, and make for an interesting police ID parade.

'Ullo, ullo, ullo – what have we here then Super Gran. Do you recognise any of these butt cracks?”

Fight or flight?

Now bunnies don't have big hearts. When it comes down to fight or flight, we opt for flight as fast as a rabbit can go – generally about 48km/hr in a zigzag pattern. I wouldn't have the stomach to do what ‘Super Gran' did. Fear, pain, injury, death and self-preservation would all be front of mind when I decided not to get involved. And I have several litters of baby rabbits to feed every year. We're always looking for love during those long dark nights down the warren.

I am told there were more than 500 ram raids last year. But because our youth justice system works on the basis of diversion, 90 per cent of those young offenders avoided court. They're still held accountable, they're encouraged to accept responsibility and learn from their mistakes and develop socially acceptable behaviours. The thinking is that once a young offender goes to court and gets a criminal record, it normalises offending for them and their offences only get more serious.

But dealing with youth offenders is all done out of sight. And that's why punters sense ram raiders are being slapped with wet bus tickets. Day in and day out we see and hear the senselessness of it all, the damage to people and property, and we hear stories of young ram raiders laughing in the policeman's face because they know they are protected by their age. We feel powerless and pissed. We want to make them care because they don't care. They are not afraid of the consequences.

How and why?

Here's a go. Stand these young offenders before the court of ‘Super Gran' and her like. She'd would give them a flea in the ear and perhaps impose some novel punishments – like curfews, like work, like weekend community service, like school, like a serious dose of discipline and some parental accountability.

I can hear them all screaming ‘unfair' and ‘abuse' already. The punks would hate it, but we might all be better off. A colleague did ask how and why are kids are allowed on the street at overnight until 5.30 in the morning? No work, no school, no parental control. That's how and why.

Now we understand our ram raiders escaped with a phone. Just one phone. But the collateral damage was ‘Super Gran's munted RAV4, her trauma, two crunched and probably stolen getaway cars, and a badly damaged commercial premises. Time, money, property, inconvenience and disruption – it all adds up.

Even if there is insurance – we all pay in the end.